Tadej Pogacar says ‘phenomenal’ Remco Evenepoel ‘can win the Tour de France’, lauds ‘machine’ Juan Ayuso

Tadej Pogacar says Remco Evenepoel “can win the Tour de France” and has lauded “machine” and his potential successor at UAE-Team Emirates, Juan Ayuso.

The 2022 cycling season was memorable for many reasons, with one of the undoubted highlights Pogacar and Jonas Vingegaard’s ding-dong duopoly at the Tour – a feature that looked like being repeated at numerous editions ahead, given the pair’s young ages.

“This year he [Evenepoel] had a phenomenal year but next year he can be even better,” Pogacar, 24, told reporters at his team’s pre-season training camp in Spain.

“He’s going in the right direction, for sure. He won the Vuelta, so the Tour is just a little different.

“But I think if you can win one Grand Tour and be world champion at the same time, you can win the Tour as well.”

And if Pogacar is to be believed, then his UAE team-mate, Spaniard Ayuso, will be another to watch when the Tour gets underway in Bilbao on July 1.

“If I am s**t at the Tour, then he can go,” Pogacar explained.

“For me, it’s no problem. We understand each other and you can only be good for so many years; you cannot be at the top all of the time.

“For sure, if he gets better we will exchange some races and some roles, but we are all here in the UAE team to take the team as a group together to a higher level, so we try to win as much as possible and it doesn’t matter who.”

Pogacar added that Ayuso is “one of the biggest machines you will see in cycling. He is super strong, super talented, and we saw in the Vuelta he finished third and he will do great things in cycling”.

Despite Pogacar losing his Tour crown in 2022, he was keen to make clear how successful he felt he had been in the round, and backed himself to keep trying to win what would be his third yellow jersey after his triumphs in 2020 and 2021.

The Slovenian said: “If I look back at the season, I see one of the best seasons you can imagine.

“It was a really great year all around for me: a lot of wins with the team, a lot of great moments for me.

“If I don’t win the next one [Tour de France], I will try to go another time.

“And if I don’t win the next one [after that], I will try and go another time to try and win it at least one more time.”

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